Tripod1404
Community Member
I was watching a documentary on Georgia aquarium and it was quite impressive that they trained their fish in a 6.3 million gallon tank to come to a certain feeding station using colored signs. For example, they would hand a red sign over the aquarium which would signal to stingray to come to the feeding station, a green sign would bring tuna etc.
With this in mind, I started target training my mandarin to come to Paul B style mandarin BBS feeder when I stick a small pink post-it to the side of the aquarium. The experiment started 2 day prior to the post it (days -2 and -1). I started hanging the post it on day 0. There is some variation is the data since it is influenced by how close the mandarin was to the feeders (especially early on), but I can confirm that I was able to train my mandarin in about 10 days to consistently come to the feeder with the appearance of pink post-it target.
On unfortunate outcome was also training some other fish (wrasse and chromis) to also respond to the feeder and pick BBS that manage to get through the mesh before mandarin can eat them. But they do not bother mandarin so it is not a big issue.
When I have time, I will try to use the same procedure to try to train mandarin to eat prepared foods. I will remove the mesh of the mandarin feeder, put frozen food in the feeder and put up the pink post-it. I hypothesize that mandarin will recognize the frozen brine shrimp inside the feeder as food, since it already associated the feeder station and pink post-it with having. From that I wlil try pellets.
With this in mind, I started target training my mandarin to come to Paul B style mandarin BBS feeder when I stick a small pink post-it to the side of the aquarium. The experiment started 2 day prior to the post it (days -2 and -1). I started hanging the post it on day 0. There is some variation is the data since it is influenced by how close the mandarin was to the feeders (especially early on), but I can confirm that I was able to train my mandarin in about 10 days to consistently come to the feeder with the appearance of pink post-it target.
On unfortunate outcome was also training some other fish (wrasse and chromis) to also respond to the feeder and pick BBS that manage to get through the mesh before mandarin can eat them. But they do not bother mandarin so it is not a big issue.
When I have time, I will try to use the same procedure to try to train mandarin to eat prepared foods. I will remove the mesh of the mandarin feeder, put frozen food in the feeder and put up the pink post-it. I hypothesize that mandarin will recognize the frozen brine shrimp inside the feeder as food, since it already associated the feeder station and pink post-it with having. From that I wlil try pellets.
